A little while ago someone on here posted about their "$9 startup", and how they've grown a huge mailing list of signups without writing any code. I think you're falling in to a similar trap they had: confusing signups with users and potential customers.<p>The number of people who sign up from places like friends of friends, Betali.st, etc is vanity. It doesn't actually count for anything unless you can turn them in to paying users, which is incredibly unlikely given that they're a completely random bunch of "people interested in startups". It's the difference between being interested in your product and being interested in solving the pain that your product solves. People pay for the latter. People just cost you money if they're the former, albeit not much.<p>The two metrics that really matter are how many people <i>use</i> your application and how many people <i>pay</i> for your application. You could get a million signups and still fail.<p>Sorry if this sounds harsh. I learnt this particular lesson the hard way. My advice: work out who your potential users are, who decides to buy the products they use, and market directly to them. Ignore everything else.
I would love to read a follow-up of sign-up numbers after you've been sitting on the top of HN for today :)<p>We've had some really good luck with HN for sign-ups in the past, and if you're being transparent about it, I'd love to hear how the numbers turn out for you.
Good breakdown, what about socialmedia referrals? Surely people that have tried the app have also tweeted about it, do you have any insights of how many tweets have been mentioning your product over the past few months?